The two major players in the American political scene, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, could not be any more different. They espouse different values, they run on the opposite sides of most black or white political issues, their parties are organized differently, and even the way they choose their presidential candidate are completely at odds with one another.

The Republican method of picking a Presidential slate is relatively simple. If you win a state’s primary or caucus, you win that state’s delegates. I would assume that whoever has the most delegates wins. However, the other party is a lot more difficult to figure out.

Election 2008 is a great example of the confusing and complicated way someone wins the Democratic nomination for President. The dogfight between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is raging on, with neither candidate ahead in the overall delegate count because unlike the Republican side, a candidate might win a state’s primary but they only win a percentage of that state’s delegates. If Hillary wins New York with 65 percent, she gets 65 percent of that state’s votes, but the other 35 go to Barack, and vise versa if Barack wins Nebraska (or wherever). The race is incredibly tight, and it doesn’t look like either candidate will pull out a crushing majority of delegates, so it may be up to the unaligned superdelegates to decide who wins.

What’s a superdelegate? That is a voting member of the Democratic National Convention who is not tied to any state’s particular vote. There are 794 of these individuals, who are basically the crème de la crème of the party: former Presidents, former party chairmen, former Chairmen of the House of Representatives, former Senate Majority and Minority Leaders, current members of Congress, the Democratic National Committee, and Democratic state governors. These men and women are incredibly important to the process and can decide the winner.

Here are two examples of how important superdelegates are from the article: Walter Mondale was slightly ahead of Gary Hart at the time of the Democratic convention and superdelegate support put Mondale over the finish line. […] In 2004, the opposite occurred. Howard Dean won the most number of superdelegate pledges but John Kerry won an outright majority of delegates through the primary and caucus elections.

In a year where the voting public seems evenly split, it is a collection of Washington insiders and influential people who will decide the ultimate choice for the Democratic Party’s next presidential run. Will they go with Hillary Clinton, who has many years of experience on the national stage, or the ultra-charismatic Barack Obama? The magic number of delegates is 2,025.

No matter what happens, this is probably going to get messy.

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